﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

Most of us have now heard quite extensively about the child sex abuse scandals in Rotherham. We've also begun to hear the first of the revelations about what the friends of Cyril Smith got up to and how they used the official secrets act to intimidate police officers and prevent them revealing the truth. It is tempting to think that this is a problem that only existed in one or two parts of the country during a particular period of time and that we are now moving forward. I don't believe that. Vulnerable girls being groomed for sex is nothing new. Nor is the grooming of boys. Read your Dickens and you will find plenty of examples of young women coming up to London from the country and being flattered, bullied, tempted, sweet talked, bribed or seduced step by step into prostitution. The deliberate targeting of vulnerable young girls by criminals or by predatory men has been going on since Victorian times. Given that the problem has been around for long it is clearly not something that has been introduced to this country by immigrants. The problem stems from the fact that too many people regard vulnerable young girls as poor white trash, or poor black trash, and think that they deserve no better. A poor young adolescent girl, especially one coming out of the care system, is seen as easy meat to recruit into prostitution. Any girl with a low self image can also be an equally easy target. The groomers simply tell the girls they are beautiful, offer them some short term fun, and then apply a mixture of guilt, fear, drugs and alcohol to draw them in. When some of the girls who this had happened to had the courage to complain the police service as a whole did nothing. Those excellent officers who wanted to prosecute were outnumbered and outranked by those who thought the girls were no better than they should be and it was just a bit of moaning. Even if the police had brought prosecutions, the courts would have failed the girls. The first thing that happens when a young girl appears as a witness in a sexual abuse case is that her character is taken apart. If she has ever lived a chaotic life, or ever had an ill judged sexual liaison then she is going to struggle to get taken seriously after the defence lawyer has finished with her. If the victim is a boy from a care home the attack is likely to be equally vicious.There is therefore a problem of attitude running right through society. The problem is a view that some girls, and some boys, are trash and it doesn't matter what is done to them. That attitude obviously isn't universal, and it isn't equally held by all. There is a section of the upper class that considers itself so much better than the masses that it is entitled to do whatever it likes to the worthless individuals at the bottom of the pile. I suspect we will hear an awful lot more of that attitude once the names of the individuals in the high society sex and murder ring start to come out. There is also a section in some of our more traditional religious communities that sees white unbelievers as fair game because they don't believe in the right prophet. To repeat, sex abuse isn't something new brought in by immigrants. However, denying that there is a particular attitude problem in some sections of society is unhelpful to the women in question and ultimately unhelpful to the members of any community where some people possess horribly attitudes towards women that need to be challenged.This doesn't mean that sex abuse is a problem of one community or of one or two towns. The truth is that it is a prevalent problem. Rotherham is not a particularly unusual town. The only difference between Rotherham and other towns is that its Director of Social Services paid for a proper investigation to be conducted into the problem. This uncovered the scale of the abuse with stark honesty. The result should have been the conducting of a similar enquiry in every town in the country. What happened instead was that the woman who commissioned the review was forced out. People wanted to believe that the problem was down to a few incompetent or venal senior social workers. It wasn't. We already know there are similar problems in Oxford and Rochdale. As soon as an investigation was undertaken in Sheffield it found problems on an even larger scale than Rotherham. There is a problem across the country about our attitude to the poor and the powerless and our attitude to women.One of the best ways to reduce this kind of crime is to properly expose it. We need a thorough nationwide investigation into what has taken place and what is still taking place. We also need to change our approach to tackling the entry routes into prostitution. If we focus on trying to stop the supply of vulnerable girls we are highly likely to fail. There is no shortage of the vulnerable and indeed current economic and political policies are increasing the supply. Trying to talk a naive young adolescent girl into believing that people who are offering her drugs, parties, praise and sex are actually her worst enemies is not easy. It needs to be done but it is not enough. It is much more effective to tackle the problem from a different direction. Make paying for sex a crime. Enforce the existing laws about child sexual activity. Get more female judges. Challenge the police to report on the numbers of prosecutions. Improve the quality of care homes and work on the exit strategies for those who have been in care. Pay enough to care workers to mean that good staff stay in care work long enough so that more of them know what is happening to the girls under their care.Above all there is one thing that will make a real difference. Take a different attitude towards powerful men and powerless women. We need a society that treats all people as equal. We have one that has allowed a group of MPs and high ranking men from the security services and the military to cover up murder of children during their sexual abuse. It is way past time for a change. The girls who got taken advantage of are not trash. The men who abused them are.N.B. These are my own personal views on controversial issues.

John Waller is a musician who writes his own songs and performs around Bradford and Skipton. He has written a great song about what our grandchildren are likely to say to us when they ask us to explain the mess we have made of their environment. Follow the link to Granddad to hear it. I heard him sing it in the Swan in Addingham where several musicians perform. On the night in question all the other singers chose serious topics such as war or unemployment. I chose to sing a song about someone feeling sorry for themselves outside a disco! So just to prove that I can also sing something serious I'm also attaching a link to my own composition on austerity.The protest song is not dead!

During the run up to this election politicians on all sides have been informing us in carefully measured mature tones, that it is wrong to build up problems for future generations and we must be responsible. I agree. We are responsible for putting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we are changing the climate in unpredictable ways. We need to cut our use of energy drastically starting right now and the good thing is that we already have most of the technology we need. Insulation technology is now highly effective. Solar energy is rapidly becoming highly cost effective even in cloudy Britain and can be easily installed near high use areas on brownfield sites and on new development. Most of this technology involves short term investment costs and long term reductions in bills so it can easily be made cost effective with the right government subsidies. What is even better is that freeing ourselves from much of our fossil fuel use also makes extraordinarily good sense strategically. We don't have to be nice to the Saudi women haters or the Russian authoritarians if we don't depend on their oil and gas.We are also responsible for destroying more life on this planet than anything since the asteroid did for the dinosaurs. Cutting down rainforests, destroying soil fertility and pouring so many fertilizers onto the land that we are in danger of losing the great barrier reef are all the acts of a species that is not worrying about the legacy we leave for future generations. On top of this we are responsible for dumping so much plastic into the seas that there is a giant raft of it floating in the oceans and every beach in the world - no matter how remote - gets a new consignment of plastic rubbish every day. Some people even scrub their faces with tiny plastic particles and then wash millions of tiny plastic particles into the oceans which look like food to plankton and put at risk the whole ocean food chain. It is much more expensive to clean up these problems than it is to try and prevent them taking place at all. But the expense of prevention falls on us whilst the cost of the clean up falls on our children so we carry on putting off the unavoidable task of creating a circular economy that reuses the materials things are made from. Don't worry. The next generation can pay our bills.Being highly responsible we also destroying our pollinating insects. Careless international imports of bees is spreading disease and pests which are wiping out many of our bumblebees. Reckless destruction of hedgerows and trees is depriving pollinating insects of breeding sites, food and shelter. Huge industrialised agriculture operators are planting the same crop over miles of countryside and holding back the insects that might each it via chemical spraying or building pesticides into the seeds to penetrate the whole plant. The next generations are going to want to know what happened to all the natural predators and why they have to hand pollinate crops. The alternative of getting higher yields per acre via growing varied crops and using integrated pest management techniques are available now. They require more investment in agriculture and more agricultural employment but we are not using them because the methods we use are cheaper right now - even if they are much more expensive in the long run.The list of the things we are responsible is a long one but I will just pick out one more. We are generating power by creating massive quantities of nuclear waste that we don't know what to do with. No human civilisation has ever lasted for 2,000 years continuously without experiencing a period of lengthy disruption. Ours needs to last that long in order to store nuclear waste safely until it is somewhat near tolerable levels of toxicity.It would be a brave historian who would find this to be a secure prediction of the future and no climate scientist would tell you that decommissioned power stations near coastal estuaries (the commonest site) will be safe from changes to sea levels. Yet we continue to build nuclear power stations and to create even more waste that we don't know what to do with. Never mind. Future generations will sort it out.If this is being responsible then maybe it is time for a change and we should all support one of the minor parties. Say one that is committed to thinking long term. One that is committed to prioritising environmental problems. One that isn't scared to say that we might need to spend a bit of money on helping our children. One that is prepared to use government to help solve problems rather than assuming it must always be a nuisance that is getting in the way of today's quick and easy profits. A party, say, that calls itself Green!

When it comes to the economy we are often told that we must be responsible and we must not leave problems for the next generation to solve. I agree. There are lots of serious economic problems that we are not tackling properly and we are being irresponsible in ignoring them. They include:1. The risk of banking collapseIn 2008 the banks had gambled more money on complex financial products than the value of the entire world economy. Then they discovered that the products weren't as valuable as they thought and this set off a panic that came within hours of ruining the whole world economy. The only thing that rescued us from this panic was effective action by governments and central banks. The free market was bailed out by the state. As a consequence the state acquired huge debts. Nothing serious has been done to separate risky parts of banking from ordinary household banks. Nothing has been done to stop banks gambling with our money. Nothing has been done to tax properly the very high incomes bankers can earn from such gambles. All of this leaves us wide open to a repeat of boom and bust. And what are we doing about it? Threatening the poor with another £30 billion of cuts and leaving the fundamental weaknesses of the banking system alone. That's what I call being irresponsible. 2. Using fossil fuelsWhen they are gone they are gone. Fossil fuels are the ultimate example of using up your capital and not living off your income. What is even worse they are a rare case where spending your capital actually causes positive damage to the future economy. We simply don't know how much carbon dioxide it is safe to pump into the atmosphere or how much we have changed the climate for future generations. We do know what technology to use to massively reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. We just aren't ready yet to pay the price - we'd rather leave the problem for our children. That's what I call irresponsible.3. Buying more than we sellAny country that imports more than it exports for any length of time is bound to find that it enters some form of economic decline. For the UK the gap in the Balance of Payments is more than 6% of everything we produce in the year. This is a massive amount. It will take several years of major investment into changing the nature of what we produce in this country, improving the skills of our population and re-orientating our economy to get to the point where we have this back in balance. This very real problem barely receives a mention and instead we are assured that Britain is back and everything will soon be fine. Hoping that a problem will go away- now that's what I call irresponsible. 4. Letting them get away with it because it is too difficultWe live in a world economy. But we don't have effective world control over it. As a result companies can take their production to whichever country offers the lowest wages and the lowest costs in terms of health and safety and pollution controls. Companies that do still trade in the UK such as Starbucks can use their accountants to move their revenues to the countries with the lowest tax rates so that they can make profits out of us but contribute nothing to our society in the way of tax. Those same accountants can also encourage wealthy citizens to play the same game. As a result we are told that we must lower income tax or else the rich will simply go abroad. No serious effort has been made by our country to get together with other countries to properly manage the international economy. Telling the poor that they must pay tax whilst the rich get away with it. That's what I call irresponsible.5. Organising a pre-election boomGeorge Osborne has made budget plans based on high growth rates for the next five years. With inflation at zero and Britain entering a dangerous deflationary cycle his predictions are deeply optimistic. He has allowed the bank of England to print £375 billion and pump it into the banking system in order to counteract the cuts he has made to public services. Instead of being spent on refocusing the economy to be better prepared for the future most of that money has gone into a speculative boom in shares and in high end London property prices. It can't last. Telling people everything is fine just before an election and then driving us back into crisis with another £30 billion of cuts at a time of deflation. Now that's what I call irresponsible.Chancellors of the exchequer are very fond of making grand statements about how well they have done in their efforts to fix the economy. It is not so very long since Gordon Brown told us that he had put an end to boom and bust. Just before the worst crash since the great depression. Now we are being told by George Osborne that Britain isn't walking tall and he needs another five years and another £30 billion of cuts to finish the job. Britain isn't walking tall it is walking on egg shells. The days of secure and easy economic growth without thought for the future consequences are gone. Right now the only secure and sustainable way that we can build an economic future is to invest properly in a circular economy where we put back into the earth exactly as much as we take out of it.If you really want a more responsible approach to the future then vote green.

One of the worst habits anyone interested in politics can get into is assuming that good ideas must all come from the party they support and every idea from another party must be a bad one. I've always thought that this kind of tribalism is unhealthy and I'm increasingly convinced that it is one of the reasons why people don't like politicians even when they are completely honest and dedicated. If all you are doing is supporting one particularly team rather than thinking out what is in the best interests of people and the planet then you don't deserve anyone's vote.I've therefore been trying to think of things the other parties are supporting that seem to me to be completely sensible. The best idea I think the Conservatives have is Transport for the North as a key means of supporting a northern powerhouse. To me, it makes real sense to rebalance the UK economy so that more takes place in the north as this spreads income around, makes it possible for more people to have access to a good range of careers without moving south, and makes good use of existing housing stock. Providing a fast and efficient rail transport network between the big northern cities has to be one of the most Green ways of achieving this. Linking the smaller northern towns efficiently into this and creating a tube like network with its own integrated ticketing system also makes huge sense. I do, of course, have criticisms this policy which include:*why didn't the idea come up four and a half years ago?*why are we being asked to wait until after HS2 to get started on it?*if integrated transport is right for the north then why did we break up the national rail system into fragmented private units? Why aren't we nationalising and integrating the whole rail network?*Is George Osborne planning to do this as a coherent public sector project or as a PFI style expensive mess?*what is the point in planning so much new infrastructure for the private car if we are going to get an efficient tube style system? In London a lot of people don't bother with cars because public transport is frequent.Despite these criticisms I think this policy is fundamentally sound and should be supported. Even if that puts me on the same side as George Osborne for once in my life? I don't care where an idea stems from. I do care whether it might help the planet and help the economy. Oh, and I also care whether it is made up on the eve of the election because it sounds like it might win some votes in marginal constituencies and then gets quietly dropped the morning after the election. Well, come on, you wouldn't expect me to be completely naive about the motives of the Conservatives would you??!!

You can learn an awful lot from what is in a budget. You can learn a lot more from what is not. Where was the commitment to invest in continued improvements to the NHS - or even the promise of proper funding for it? Where was the plan to radically transform Britain into a low fuel consumption economy that can compete on production and deployment of the latest green technology? And where was the detail on which bits of the welfare state would be destroyed in order to achieve a further £12 billion of cuts in the welfare budget. There was also, yet again, a complete absence of a fundamental reform to the banking system so that the causes of the 2008 crisis were addressed. We've been told how much more austerity we need and that this will fix the public spending problems which were a symptom of the banking crisis. Yet, there was a complete absence of any explanation of why the crash happened. Unless you buy the argument that the feckless poor did it. Unless you think that the banking collapse was just a bit of bad luck whilst the existence of the welfare state is a dangerous luxury that the rich can't really afford anymore if they are going to be able to trickle their wealth down to us.We are promised a further £30 billion of cuts. Promised it by not just the Conservative Party but by Labour and the Lib Dems. UKIP are of course radically different. They will hold the feet of the Chancellor to the fire to ensure that he delivers the £30 billion cuts quickly. This is not responsible economic management. It is ignoring the core problem of too much instability in a wildly uncontrolled free market. It is ignoring the issue of too little sustainable business resulting in the biggest ever deficit in the UK's balance of payments at 6% of GNP. It is failing to invest on the transformation that is required to deal with a low energy future. It is insisting on an out of date extremist ideology that the free market can solve every problem and government destroying. What we actually need is a sensible balance of the free market doing what it is good at and local, national and international government doing its part efficiently. Running a properly integrated public railway system. Running a well resourced health system. Providing a proper welfare state safety net. Steering investment into critical areas such as research into new antibiotics, utilisation of solar technology, and energy efficient homes and products. Making sure producers pay the real cost of the impact of the products and services they supply and subsidising producers to adapt to a circular economy where we reduce the plastic waste mountain and re-cycle the vast majority of what we consume.I was therefore overjoyed the read the common sense that came through in the Green Party's reaction to the budget. Since you are unlikely to be able to see much of the press statement on TV or in the newspaper, I thought it might be helpful if I included it here. This is what it says:* Austerity is a failed political project* We are not ‘all in this together’* We need to see a radical departure away from the business-as-usual economics on display in today’s budget* Tax breaks for oil and gas are ‘eye-watering’People struggling to get by will find little cheer in the Coalition’s final budget, says the Green Party. Greens call for an immediate end to austerity-led economics and a rebalancing of the economy so that it works for the common good.The Green Party is unashamed about its ambition to increase both government spending and taxation to help create a fairer, more sustainable society.Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s budget announcement of £1.3 billion of tax cuts for North Sea oil and gas production with no new investment in renewables shows how out of touch this government is on climate change, says the Green Party, the only party truly committed to transitioning to a zero-carbon economy.Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, said:“This final Coalition budget offers little hope to the many millions of people across Britain who are struggling to get by. Austerity economics has failed.“Incomes are still lower than they were in 2010 (1), household debt is up (2) and inequality continues to plague this country. In the world’s sixth-biggest economy, people should not have to queue at food banks or work in insecure jobs that don’t pay enough to get by on.“We need to see a radical departure away from the kind of business-as-usual economics on display in today’s budget. That means building an economy that works for the common good, an economy that pays people a Living Wage, protects our public services and invests in renewable technologies that cut fuel bills and help combat climate change.Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion and the Green Party’s Economy spokesperson, said:“This is an electioneering Budget from a Chancellor who puts politics above people.“That Mr Osborne would have the nerve to suggest ‘we’re all in this together’ is astonishing and shows just how out of touch the Government is with those it’s supposed to serve. What typical Tory smoke and mirrors.“No – we are most certainly not all in this together. Food bank use has rocketed. Hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs have been slashed. Zero-hours contacts are rising. Brutal cuts to services and welfare have hit the poor hardest – while the richest have seen their wealth rise.“And all this while granting another eye-watering tax break, at public expense, to multinational oil and gas companies - and just weeks after a cross-party climate pledge. Investment in home-grown renewable technologies would mean more jobs and greater stability in the long term – the business case is incredibly compelling, and a just transition to a zero carbon economy is absolutely crucial to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South-West and the Green Party’s Finance spokesperson, said:“We believe that austerity is a political project, designed to reinforce the power of financial and corporate elites, and achieve the long-held ambition of those on the right in politics of bringing about the shrinking of the state."What stands out in this budget is the huge tax breaks for the fossil fuel dinosaurs, which will drag us back from the cusp of a green energy revolution. This is a hugely wasted economic opportunity to drive the transition to a zero carbon economy. Now is the time to divest from fossil fuels not drive forward further exploration. We know that two thirds of the known fossil fuels must remain in the ground if we are to limit global warming to 2C.”EndsNotes1) http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/76152) http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/why-inequality-is-an-economic-problem

If you run a pub then your first thought in the election might not be a Green vote. Yet a lot of the things that good publicans believe in are at the heart of the Green Party agenda.Most publicans are proud of serving a wide range of choice that includes well made locally sourced beers. The contrast between a real ale from a local supplier and a cask ale from an international corporation pretty much sums up the Green Party's approach. We favour small and local businesses and want to limit the power of large corporations over those businesses. Naturally this means that we campaigned for and supported the removal of some restrictions associated with tied houses. We'd like to see negotiations of leases conducted on a more equal basis as well, so that when a publican is successful it doesn't result in an immediate increase in the rent with much of the profits being siphoned off by breweries that are often part of huge drinks industry conglomerates. It can't be right that these companies can sell beer so cheaply in bottles and cans to supermarkets that they can seriously undercut the price of drinking it from the cheaper-to-supply kegs in your pub. Banks have done publicans no favours. In the run up to 2008 the Labour Party allowed banks to gamble with people's savings and lend more money than is earned by the entire world economy in one year. The exotic financial derivatives that they bought then collapsed in value. Now banks are scared to lend to help businesses develop and are charging intimidating rates to pubs that try and expand.But the biggest threat to publicans is the austerity policy imposed by the Coalition government. People whose wages are frozen or whose jobs are at risk simply cannot afford to come to your pub regularly.Austerity has had a direct impact on the trade of many pubs and has driven an awful lot of good pubs to the wall. Yet austerity isn't a necessary or efficient economic policy and in the 1930s it produced the Great Depression. In a boom governments should cut back state spending and pay down debt, to restrain excessive growth. In a downturn that is the very worst thing they can do. If people can't afford to spend then businesses like yours lose custom, staff get laid off, wages and hours are reduced, so tax revenues go down and government has even less money and demands even more austerity. Austerity is pain inflicted on you and your customers as a result of seriously flawed economic policy. Yet we are the only political party in England that opposes it.As someone who likes a pint and has always appreciated the attractions of a good pub I am standing for parliament because I think that we need significant change in the way we approach things in this country. I would value your support at the election in May. ﻿﻿

There are 7 billion people in the world at the moment. Estimates of how many more there will be before the world population stabilises vary but 10 billion would be a highly conservative estimate.On average people are getting richer quickly. In 2012 the world economic growth rate was 5.2% in a single year. Visualise for a moment the impact of 10 billion people living a middle class lifestyle and consuming the same level of resources that the average person does in the UK. It simply doesn't work.One way of tackling this is to turn around to people in what used to be the third world and say that you can't have this kind of lifestyle but the old rich West can. It is only necessary to state this to make if self evident that it is an unreasonable point of view that cannot possibly stand up to a moment's challenge from someone in a rapidly developing country. It simply isn't reasonable to say to poor countries that they cannot have economic growth and that they cannot enjoy higher standards of living. Even those of us with a dislike of consumer culture cannot pretend that it is unreasonable in a hot country to want to acquire a fridge or for a women whose life is limited by the drudgery of spending hours on hand washing to want to buy a washing machine. An increase in the standard of living is desirable for the vast majority of people living in poor countries. It is also desirable for the vast majority of poor people in the UK who could make their lives a lot easier if they had enough money and who would spend much of it on the basic and veryuseful consumer goods that some of us already have. I have always regarded taking people out of poverty and giving them a decent standard of living as a positive. I have also always regarded economic policies such as austerity which slow down economic growth and force large numbers of people to experience unemployment or low wages as extremely bad.The question therefore becomes how to resolve an apparent contradiction. If we all get richer then the levels of consumption of energy, resources and food that this implies go beyond what the planet can sustain. There will be more of us. The vast majority of us like being able to afford necessary and nice things. Yet if we all do that the planet will collapse under the pressure and the economic and environmental misery that will result will go beyond what any of us can properly imagine. We tend to phrase our concerns about the environment in terms of degrees of global warming and concerns that we will hit peak oil. We ought to be saying that you or your children will starve. The short term increase in consumption will result in a long term collapse. The soil, the air, our forests and our water can't survive the rate of use of fertilisers and oil and the generation of C02 and plastic waste that will result.It would be nice if the way out of this could be to teach every person on the planet to adopt a low consumption philosophy and to learn to live in balance and harmony with the planet. This is very unlikely to happen. Or even if it does it isn't going to happen soon enough to fend off severe problems.The only way out of this situation is to find ways of providing what people want with reduced levels of damaging and unsustainable consumption. This means three big things have to change:1. We can only consume products that are made from components that can easily be taken apart and put back into use. What we consume cannot be thrown away. The economy of production and consumption has to be circular. Plastics have to be kept to a minimum and only made in ways that make them easy to biodegrade into useful by products. 2. What we consume has to use much less energy. Indeed much of what we consume has to produce energy as well as use it. This requires changes in technology and those changes need to be both improvements to existing technology that is going to be around in the medium term and investment in developing and implementing the technology we need for a genuinely sustainable future. An easy example to quote is homes. It is already perfectly possible to improve insulation in houses, to add solar panels or heat exchanges and to end up with a home which generates more power than it uses. A more challenging example is the car. Whether we like it or not the numbers of cars is going to continue to increase for many years. Their impact will clearly not be good for the planet. The damage will be much less if they are efficient and consume little fuel. It will be less again if they can generate solar energy through their roofs, if they can run off hydrogen fuel, if third world countries begin their car consumption with electric vehicle infrastructure and if the materials they are made from are all recycled.3. The way we produce food has to change. It has to be done with massively less energy, with less pesticides, and with better planned irrigation. This requires greater varieties of crops to be grown and rotated within any given area of land so that pests and diseases are manageable. And this requires extra time, money and technology. Industry has used new technology to move away from clumsy production lines producing identical products and generating enormous pollution. Agriculture can achieve the same. Industrial agriculture is cheap but it is unsustainable and it doesn't produce particularly high yields per square metre. High tech eco-agriculture using integrated pest management can produce greater varieties of food in greater quantities without destroying the environment.As I see it the alternatives are simple.a. We do nothing and let the world economy consume itself into collapse.b. We persuade some very poor people that they don't want to be wealthy and consume those nice products they've seen on TVc. National and international government provides strong enough incentives and enforceable lawsto ensure that we have the science and the spirit of enterprise to move to a new era of a circular economy.There is no doubt that the last of these options is exceptionally hard and difficult to pull off. The price of the first will eventually force us to do it. The real challenge is to develop the political will to achieve the change before it is too late. Provided of course we think our species and our planet are worth saving!

Andy has lived in the constituency for over 20 years in the village of Cononley. He is 63 years old and is married with a son, a step daughter and two grandchildren.He is now retired, having worked as a teacher in inner city London colleges before moving up to Yorkshire to become Head of Faculty of Business at Keighley College. Thanks to his work on transforming the quality of that college Andy became Deputy Principal there and then the Director of Hillsborough College in Sheffield. This made him responsible for providing a service for 2,000 full time and 10,000 part time students. His success in this role led to his becoming Executive Director of the Learning and Skills Council in the Black Country and then Director of Young People's Learning for Yorkshire and the Humber before becoming Director of Academies for the whole of the north of England.He writes regularly for the Yorkshire Post country section and has also written on educational issues for the Independent, the Guardian and the Times Educational Supplement. He joined the Green Party because of his conviction that we need to take proper care of the environment that surrounds us. He believes that austerity is a dangerous economic choice and that our problems originated with a 2008 banking crisis that still hasn't been properly tackled. He wants to see the economy re-balanced so that there is much more emphasis on sustainable business practices. He finds it unforgivable that the Bank of England has printed £370 billion and given it to the banks whilst ordinary people have been told to tighten their belts. He is strongly committed to the welfare state and believes that there should be an end to top down re-organisations of public services such as education and health.When it comes to the issue of defence he believes that we should only go to war when the vital interests of this country are at stake. The Greens opposed our involvement with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars at times when this was highly unpopular and this now looks farsighted. Andy also opposes our involvement in Syria and the Ukraine and believes that Trident is an outdated waste of money that cannot help us fight a modern war.He is a strong supporter of freedom of speech for all and therefore supported the right of Charlie Hebdo and Danish cartoonists to print what they liked. Importantly he also supports this right for those he disagrees with - provided they do not incite hatred or violence. He believes that a sensible degree of sustainable immigration is good for a country because young immigrants contribute highly to their society. He wishes to reform the EU but thinks that if we leave it then other countries will makerules that we will still have to follow if we wish to trade and we will simply lose jobs and influence.Above all he is convinced that we are not looking after the environment. Across Skipton and Ripon there are endless proposals to develop new housing across green land whilst there are perfectly good re-development opportunities being ignored. Our farmers are under so much price pressure from supermarkets that milk is now cheaper than water and small local farmers continue to get too little financial support to enable them to produce food sustainably. We also remain at risk of fracking taking place beneath our feet at a time when a proper investment in technology could enable us to massively reduce energy consumption and enable us to avoid pumping yet more CO2 into the atmosphere.

He does not expect the Green Party to win in this constituency but he does think that every single vote for the Green Party will matter because it will help send a real message to the political establishment that people want change.

Over the last 7 years we have heard a lot about the need for austerity. We have been told again and again that we must tighten our belts and it is important to cut down on government spending to balance the books. Yet, whilst all the pay freezes and cutbacks in services have taken place, over £375,000,000,000 of money has been printed by the Bank of England and pumped into the economy.You might be forgiven for wondering what has happened to all that cash. Perhaps it has been used to build some new hospitals without mortgaging our future with a PFI contract? No. Has it then been used to invest in new schools so that the 25% of children in Bradford who go to a second choice school have better options? That's not it either. Nor has it been used to help invest in science and technology to prepare us for an energy efficient future and to help industry and commerce to recover and to fix the 6% deficit in our balance of payments.What they have done with this cash is to pump it into the banking system to try and ensure that the banks remains solvent. That means £375 billion of easy money has gone to those who created our financial problems whilst those who were not responsible for them such as nurses and teachers have been told there is no money.Give the Bank of England its due. This extravagant expansionist policy is working. It has prevented a collapse in the banks and has paved the way for a return to economic growth. You cannot pump that amount of money into the economy via what is called quantitative easing without an impact. Equally you cannot keep interest rates at 0.5% for 7 years without helping business - at, of course, the expense of those living off savings.The great myth of our time is that the economy is returning to growth because of prudent cuts. When you impose austerity at a time of an economic downturn the results are well known. Falling incomes produce falling sales, which means lower revenues for companies, resulting in people getting sacked, incomes falling and governments discovering that they need another round of austerity. The policy was tried once before in the 1930s. The result was the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. Fortunately the Bank of England and the IMF have refused to go down that route and have injected liquidity into the market for 7 years. Unfortunately what has been done with that money has been wasteful in the extreme.I suspect that if you conducted a straw poll of the electorate and asked them what they would do with £375 billion then very few of them would say "You know what, I think we should make it available to those nice bankers who got us into our problems in the first place. We really need them to have bigger bonuses so that their income can trickle down to me". With inflation at 0.3% and falling there is a need to pump yet more money into the economy to head off damaging deflation. The pound stands at record levels of 1.37 against the euro. We drastically need to pump money into the economy to bring this down so industry can compete. In these rare one off circumstances the Bank of England could very easily generate another round of quantitative easing without creating damaging inflation. The critical question is: "What will the government allow it do with the cash?"If we really want to rebalance the economy so that it is well placed to compete in a world economy then I would argue that we should not be handing any more easy money to the banks. We could choose to use some of the next £375 billion to pay off a large chunk of the national debt. Or much better we could invest in updating our industry and our homes so that they function with much less consumption of energy and raw materials and thus ensure that they have a long term sustainable future. That is what I would choose. I will leave others to speculate on their own list of priorities!